"You can pray for him," said Reggie, earnestly, "God does hear and answer prayer and He can save to the uttermost." He hesitated and then added in a lower tone,
"Mrs. Gray, are you an abstainer yourself?"
"Well, not quite," said she, "but I hardly take anything."
Reggie nodded.
"Yes, but you take as much as you care to, and he takes as much as he cares to. That is how Mr. Gray would look at it, and the way God looks at it is this, 'Judge this rather that no man put a stumbling block or an occasion to fall in his brother's way. Anything whereby thy brother stumbleth or is offended or is made weak.'"
They had reached the Bank and she held out her hand with a sigh.
"Thank you," she said, "well, I'll think about it."
Reggie walked on to the corner of his own road and stood looking down it distastefully.
Here he was in the middle of Bank holiday afternoon, in his best clothes, with nowhere to go and no one to speak to, feeling as if his life and himself and everything else were an utter failure. If he had only had on his cycling suit, he might have contemplated a ride, but the thought of turning into his dull lodgings, even to change, was unbearable, and the writing of a letter to Gertrude, with which he had beguiled many a lonely hour before, was not possible to-day.
He turned at the sound of quick footsteps behind him, and heard his name called.